The Ice Planet

Dail Mail, 8 July 2008

Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that’s the problem. Britain still doesn’t grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.

The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried as either ‘ Islamophobes’ or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Certainly, the police and security service have been foiling plot after plot and are bringing to court a steady stream of Islamist radicals –an improvement without doubt from three years ago. And so, particularly within the British elite, people think that things are broadly under control.

They fail to realise that the attempt to take over our culture is even more deadly to this society than terrorism. They are simply blind to the ruthless way in which the Islamists are exploiting our chronic muddle of well-meaning tolerance and political correctness (backed up by the threat of more violence) to put Islam on a special — indeed, unique — footing within Britain.

As a result, the steady Islamisation of British public life is either being ignored or even tacitly encouraged by a political, security and judicial establishment that is failing to identify the stealthy and mind-bending game that is being played.

The official counter-radicalisation programme illustrates the problem. The Government wants to tackle radicalisation within Britain’s Muslim community by winning hearts and minds within that community. Its strategy is based on isolating the extremists and encouraging the moderates.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has ‘hijacked’ and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

The reason so many older British Muslims are traditionally moderate is that they were brought up in the Asian subcontinent under a tamed form of Islam, deriving from centuries of colonial rule, which glossed over much of the teaching of the religion.

The Government believes that Islamic radicalism can be countered by teaching authentic Islam to Muslims. But since Islamic radicalism is based upon those very authentic religious precepts, this will undoubtedly have the effect of radicalising people who otherwise would never have thought in this way.

The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) was set up to put into effect the Government’s aim of ensuring moderation in the mosques. This was always unlikely, given that members of Islamist groupings were on the steering committee. Although MINAB’s chairman, Manazir Ahsan, presents himself as a reformer, he is the director of the Islamic Foundation, which follows the writings of Maulana Maududi — who preached an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of unbelievers who should be made to live in a state of subordination to Islam.

Similarly, Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, the Government’s chief adviser on Islamic Studies, is a senior member of the Islamic Foundation. A report he wrote for the Government last year, Islam at Universities in England, which was publicly welcomed by the Prime Minister, urged that among other special privileges for Muslims, they should be allowed to teach Islamic subjects in British universities and that non-Muslims should be banned from doing so.

In any event, the universities are steadily being Islamised, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies being set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda.

A report by Professor Anthony Glees due to be published in the autumn will argue that extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multimillion-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations.

He says: ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government’s own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’

Even more terrifying is the increasing Islamisation of the police. It has been reported that up to eight police officers and civilian staff working in the Metropolitan Police and other forces are suspected of links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, with some even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. One suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

No less disturbing is the fact that the police are intentionally bringing Islamists into the force in the utterly misguided belief (shared by many in the security service) that they can help counter Islamic radicalism.

Commander Robert Lambert, who until this year ran the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit, observed that terrorism could not be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with Salafists (Sunni extremists who believe in Islamic supremacy over the secular state) — one of whom was actually an officer in his own police department.

Commander Lambert believed that this would enable the police to understand the way extremists thought before they committed any acts of terror.

But it surely goes without saying that an officer who is committed to the overthrow of the West, and its replacement by an Islamic society poses a security risk of the first order. For a police counter-terrorism specialist to be promoting this situation beggars belief.

Deeply alarmed sources have furthermore told me that, in the overriding concern by police forces to hire more ethnic minority officers, they have junked vetting criteria — particularly when it comes to hiring Police Community Support Officers, who after two years can become fully fledged police officers with no further vetting required. The result, say these sources, is that the security of police operations is potentially compromised.

Moreover, there have been disturbing examples of the police protecting Islamic extremism. In 2007, the Channel Four Dispatches programme uncovered evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques.

But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the West Midlands Police first tried to prosecute the programme makers and then accused them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion — a libel for which the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were subsequently forced to apologise.

A report by the Centre for Social Cohesion on honour killings and similar violence revealed that several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have run away from home to escape violence, because they cannot trust Asian police officers not to betray the girls to their abusing families.

In February, Christian evangelists Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham were handing out Bible extracts in Alum Rock, Birmingham. They were stopped by a Muslim Police Community Support Officer, threatened with arrest if they carried on preaching in ‘a Muslim area’, and warned that they might get beaten up if they came back.

What on earth is happening when, in the heart of England, a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

When the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Britain was developing Muslim nogo areas, he was denounced as Islamophobic.

The Establishment queued up to say they didn’t recognise the Britain he was describing. But British public life is progressively being Islamised, with Muslim radicals in areas with large concentrations of Muslims increasingly intimidating non-Muslims.

After a vicar in East London, Canon Michael Ainsworth, was beaten up by three Muslims in his own churchyard in March, it was revealed that there had been many attacks on churches in the area by such youths, who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’

Yet last month, one of the youths in the Ainsworth attack walked free after a judge accepted his claim that the attack was not religiously motivated.

Sharia law is steadily encroaching into British institutions. Last week, Lord Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it could play a role in some parts of the legal system. This followed comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury who declared that Muslim families should be able to choose between English and Islamic law in marital and family issues.

But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with a blind eye being turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy; indeed, welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men.

Meanwhile, the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism. Last month, a judge freed from prison Abu Qatada, the most important Al Qaeda operative in Europe and the lynchpin of numerous European terror attacks, who was being held pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial.

His release on bail — into a kind of house arrest — followed an Appeal Court ruling that he could not be deported to Jordan because any prosecution there might have been obtained as a result of a witness being tortured — a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Why do the British authorities appear to go out of their way to thwart efforts to fight and defeat jihadi terror? While Islamists are being appeased, the Christian church is being discriminated against. The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.

But Islamism will be repulsed only if Britain once again regains the confidence of its own culture, heritage and traditions. And these are based on Christianity.

Ms Blears’s lamentable comment graphically illustrates the problem. While the ordinary people of Britain are increasingly aghast at the way their country is being transformed by Islamism, the political, judicial, security and intellectual elites are busy denying the nature of the danger and making it far, far worse through a combination of extreme ignorance, arrogance and sheer funk.

The Islamists launched their jihad against the West because they perceived it was so weak and confused it would not possess the wherewithal to defend itself. When it comes to Britain, they never spoke a truer word.

This is an abridged version of a new foreword to an updated edition of ‘Londonistan‘
by Melanie Phillips, published in the UK by Gibson Square.

by Melanie Phillips at July 08, 2008 07:40 AM

Daily Mail, 7 July 2008

The resignation of Ray Lewis as the Mayor of London’s crime adviser is quite simply a tragedy, with profound implications far beyond the insular world of the capital’s party politics.

Here is a man who has literally saved lives. Among the boys whose behaviour he has transformed through his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy in East London are those who, without any doubt, would otherwise have gone on to kill or be killed.

Yet Mr Lewis has suddenly been accused of a slew of torrid offences including financial irregularities, physical abuse and sexually inappropriate behaviour. At present, we don’t know the truth about these murky allegations. Mr Lewis has already robustly denied the more lurid claims, but perhaps some of them are true.

Maybe all those who have supported him in the past — ranging from the Tories’ social justice guru Iain Duncan Smith to Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone’s (now disgraced) race adviser who described his approach as ‘brilliant’ — are thus shown up to be naive and credulous dupes.

If so, then I am one of them. I visited the Eastside Academy in July 2005, months before David Cameron used it for his first official photo-op as the new Tory leader. I saw for myself the impressive work Ray Lewis was doing.

He took black boys from shattered family backgrounds who were on the way to criminal careers and turned them into high-achieving model citizens.

These were the toughest boys in the neighbourhood. They had fought, bullied, smashed up their schools and set fire to them, barricaded teachers into the classrooms and been in accelerating trouble with the law. Yet when they left Eastside virtually all of them went to college and lived law-abiding lives.

Ray Lewis achieved this by plugging the crucial gap in their lives that virtually no teacher or social worker or probation officer can fill. He was simply the father figure they so desperately needed but who was missing from their own fractured families.

He was a tough, stern, authoritative, totally uncompromising black man — all factors crucial to gaining their respect.

All he achieved was through the force of his personality. The boys did what he told them to do, not because he hit them but because his disapproval was shattering to them.

He loved and believed in those boys, he gave them a sense of unlimited aspiration and he drove them very hard. And because they both feared his tongue and admired him, they responded by transforming themselves.

He made them conform to strict rules of discipline; there were military-style roll calls, they were instructed to make eye contact with their tutors and to walk in straight lines with no deviations and no talking. The importance of such ‘tough love’ to boys who possessed not even the most elementary social skills, let alone self- discipline or respect for authority, cannot be exaggerated.

He had no time at all for sloppy teaching practices, nor the usual excuses for bad behaviour such as ‘poor self-esteem’. His work was the most graphic rebuke possible to all those involved in making excuses for juvenile criminality.

As a result, he made serious enemies on the Left, who regarded him as some kind of fascist. On the local Newham council various councillors and officials badmouthed Eastside as a ‘boot camp’ and gave him only minimal funding.

This was simply because just about everything he stood for was a monumental rebuke to everything they stood for, and to the personal and social damage over which they so complacently presided.

Now at last the Left have finally brought him down. How they must be gloating at this apparent proof that inside every traditionalist disciplinarian lurks a hypocritical humbug.

As a result, the very continuation of Eastside itself is in jeopardy. Its closure would be a tragedy not just for Ray Lewis but for our entire society.

We are in the middle of an epidemic of violent crime. In the last few days, 16-yearold Shakilus Townsend was murdered in South London by a gang armed with baseball bats and a knife — the 18th teenager to meet a violent death in London this year.

Only days before, 16-year- old Ben Kinsella was knifed to death in North London, while the bodies of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez were found riddled with knife wounds after a fire at a flat in south-east London.

Ray Lewis is one of the very few who know how to turn this situation round. Whatever he may have done in the past, he has probably done more good for society through his work at Eastside than all his accusers put together.

And that achievement has arisen out of his character — including his undoubted failings. For failings he certainly has. He is abrasive, disorganised, hopeless at papermeanour-work, imprecise in his use of language and cavalier with the niceties of bureaucracy.

That certainly might explain his confused and often contradictory attempts to defend himself against the allegations that have emerged in the past week. But on the basis of what we know so far, it does not make him guilty of the more lurid claims of sexual and financial impropriety.

Indeed, there remain many peculiarities about the specifics.

Questions arise, in particular, about the behaviour of the Church of England, whose hitherto buried file on Mr Lewis detonated the affair when it mysteriously came to light.

It appears that Mr Lewis, an Anglican priest, was banned from preaching after what the Bishop of Chelmsford said was ‘a serious misde-Yet the bishop’s chaplain said Mr Lewis had been banned because ‘things had been alleged against him’. Didn’t the church find out whether they were true?

It says it alerted Mayor Johnson to them shortly after Mr Lewis’s appointment. But this turns out to have consisted merely of a) an exchange between Boris and the Bishop of Barking at a football match, which Boris says he can’t remember and, b) a passing reference in a letter to the fact that Mr Lewis ‘did not have permission to exercise his priesthood in the diocese’.

Was this really an adequate way to bring such serious charges to light? Nor did the church appear to tell the Home Office about them when Mr Lewis was appointed as a junior prison governor, nor did it inform the Eastside trustees.

The fact is that for now, the allegations remain just that. The police found no cause to proceed against Mr Lewis on any complaints that were referred to them.

What is unarguable is that he claimed to be a magistrate when he is not. By his own account, he was merely told that his application to serve on the bench was going through. That was very wrong, of course, and it is why Boris had to ditch him.

Maybe worse will eventually be proved against him. But while this whole sorry episode may demonstrate that Mr Lewis was ill-suited to political life, it should not negate his achievements in turning jail fodder into model citizens. The fact is, we simply cannot afford to lose the work he was doing with the young.

Whatever his personal failings turn out to be, it would be social suicide if his approach to delinquent youths was also discredited. Even if Ray Lewis is to be taken out of the picture, we need more people like him to continue what he started.

Our crime problem will not be solved by the dead hand of state bureaucracy but by individuals who don’t conform. Using such people means taking a risk. Sometimes that risk blows up in our face. But if we are ever to give hope to our troubled young and restore order to our society, it’s one we surely have to take.

by Melanie Phillips at July 07, 2008 08:40 AM

Jewish Chronicle, 4 July 2008

Last May, the Paris Appeal Court delivered one of the most momentous of all libel judgments. It declared that a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, was entitled to say that television footage by the France 2 TV station purporting to show the killing of 12 year-old Palestinian Mohammed al Dura by Israeli troops in November 2000 was a staged piece of theatre and that the boy had not been killed at all.

This ruling could hardly have been more significant given the iconic nature of that footage and the evidence behind the court’s decision. For the image of Mohammed al Dura clinging to his father moments before he was apparently shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim junction fuelled the intifada, which began in earnest at that point, and led directly to countless terrorist deaths around the world.

Hitherto, public doubts about this event had been confined to whether the boy had been killed by Israeli or Palestinian bullets. But the court saw hitherto untransmitted footage of that Gaza demonstration. This showed clearly that, far from being under continuous fire, not one Palestinian appeared to be harmed at all; indeed, the demonstration was conducted in a carnival atmosphere.

Most astonishing of all, after the reporter on the film, France 2’s veteran Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin, pronounced that the child now slumped on the ground had been killed not only were Mohammed and his father unmarked by any wounds, not only was there no blood at the scene, but the allegedly dead child moved his arm.

To date, not one British media outlet has reported this case (apart from my own piece in this month’s Standpoint magazine). In France, minimal press coverage pooh-poohing the ruling has been accompanied by a petition signed by 300 journalists in support of Enderlin. None of them appears to have seen the courtroom evidence. Enderlin, a national institution, has many powerful friends.

The media silence is not surprising. For those images of the ‘dead’ Mohammed al Dura perpetrated against Israel the ancient anti-Jewish libel of deliberate child killing. This was done by the media, which levelled a charge which anyone looking at the evidence can see was patently absurd. As the Paris judge wrote, there were ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ between Enderlin’s commentary and the images he was describing.

But for the media to admit this is to concede that Israel has been grievously wronged by Palestinian lies. It will not acknowledge this, because that would open up the possibility that Israel might be the victim of Palestinian lies transmitted by the western media as a matter of course.

Some have even said ‘So what if this child wasn’t actually killed? It doesn’t alter the fact that Israel murders Palestinian children!’ Thus a blood libel inoculates individuals against truth and reason.

There is however a further twist to this extraordinary story. Charles Enderlin, who claimed that the boy was killed by the Israelis on the basis of what he was told by his Palestinian cameraman Talal abu Rahma, himself holds Israeli citizenship. Not only that, when he did his own army service he actually served as a press spokesman for the IDF.

Indeed, the IDF trusted him so much that when he reported his sensational scoop it accepted responsibility for killing the child –without even asking the commander on the ground. It was only later that it conducted an inquiry and discovered that logistically it was impossible for its soldiers to have killed him.

So why did Enderlin – who is now spraying around allegations that Karsenty is the tool of ‘right-wingers’ — transmit this lethal falsehood? According to some who know him well, Enderlin believes that anything is justified if it helps force Israel to end its ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories. And ‘anything’, it seems, included transmitting the fiction of the killing of Mohammed al Dura.

This murderous corruption of journalism by France 2 was further exacerbated by the supine response of the Israel government. For seven years, it deliberately ignored the evidence of its own expert, Nahum Shahaf, that the boy had not been killed at all. It said nothing because it thought that it would not be believed, and so it would be counter-productive to focus more attention upon the affair.

During this period its own spokesman Danny Seaman did say that the killing was a fabrication – but was slapped down by the government and his remarks disowned. Meanwhile France 2 has continued to operate inside Israel with no government comeback.

The whole disturbing affair has been in short an object lesson in how the western media acts as the tool of psychological warfare waged by the enemies of civilisation, leading to the murder of countless innocents and the demonisation of a country under siege.

by Melanie Phillips at July 06, 2008 09:46 PM

The call on our screen was from Greater Manchester Ambulance Service, and there was a lot of detail crammed into a short space.

“30yof ? ‘mental breakdown’. Has just had daughter taken away from her. ? suicidal. Sister in Manchester concerned for her safety. Sent text saying ‘goodbye’. Patient’s name Anna, sister’s name Jenny.”

A lot of the time, we get calls like this, turn up, find the patient drowning their sorrows but otherwise okay and make a reassuring call to the concerned relative. Other times, we find the house locked, with no answer at the door, call the police round with their enforcers to break it down… just at the point the ‘patient’ returns from shopping. Such ‘patients’ are rarely impressed.

On this occasion, however, the ambulance crew found the door wide open, and the flat empty. The ambulance crew called me on the radio to ask what they should do next. I called Jenny, the sister, to explain what we’d found.

“She’s gone somewhere to kill herself!” sobbed Jenny.

“Do you have any idea where?” I asked.

“No,” said Jenny. “I don’t know London at all! She’s only been living there two months. She moved there to get away from her partner when they split up and took her seven year old daughter with her. But they said her daughter’s got to stay with her partner. They came and took her today. She’s not coping at all, she’s gone crazy. I seriously think she’s going to do something stupid…”

“Do you have her phone number?” I asked.

“Yes,” sniffed Jenny, “but it’s no good, she won’t answer.”

I took the number anyway. Sometimes people WILL answer when it’s a number they don’t recognise, even when they’re ignoring their family and friends. Even in the depths of suicidalness, curiosity wins over. Sure enough, the phone was picked up on the second ring.

“Hellooo?” said a wild, tearful and somewhat drunk sounding voice.

“Is that Anna?” I said. “This is the ambulance service. We’ve had a call from your sister, Jenny. She’s very concerned about you, and she’d like an ambulance to check you over. Can you tell me where you are so we can do that?”

“I don’t WANT an ambulance,” wailed Anna. “I just want to go to sleep! I am nothing but trouble to everyone. I’ll be wasting their time. There are people there who deserve help! Don’t waste your time on me when people are really sick! Tell them to go away!”

We can’t force anyone to have an ambulance if they don’t want to, but there’s no rule against gently trying to persuade them to change their mind, and I certainly thought Anna could do with talking to someone.

“Anna,” I said, “you’re not wasting anyone’s time. We’re here to help people like you. Your sister has called us, we can’t let her down. I’m not allowed to let the ambulance leave until they’ve seen you and made sure you are okay”. (This isn’t strictly true but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t know that.)

“I’m not okay, I’ll never be okay,” said Anna. “I just want to go to sleep. I’m very tired.” Her voice was slurred and distant.

“Have you taken something?” I asked, a feeling of dread rising.

“Tramadol, zopiclone… I took them all… I just want to go to sleep…” she muttered.

Oh, great. I’ve spent enough time on the phone to Guy’s Poisons investigating overdoses for crews to know that this was a potentially fatal overdose. We needed to find Anna.

“Where are you?” I asked. “We need to find you. Please tell me where you are.”

“It’s a nice place to go to sleep,” rambled Anna, seemingly missing the point of my question. “There’s grass, and a weeping willow. I like weeping willows.”

All the while this was going on, I still had the radio in my ear, with an increasing queue of impatient ambulances calling up wanting to speak to me. We usually have a dispatcher to do long winded tasks such as ringing back suicidal people who don’t want to be found, but there’s not enough of that type of work late at night to justify having one, so the radio operator has to do everything. J402 were shouting in my ear every five seconds, “J402, red base, J402! We need to go for fuel! Red base! J402!” and I don’t mind saying that this was rather distracting.

“Where’s this weeping willow?” I asked. “Is it in a park? Are you near your house? The ambulance crew are at your house. Can you go back there?”

“I won’t go back there if they are there,” said Anna, “goddamnit it… I left my travelcard there, now I can’t go back for it… still, it’s okay here, under the weeping willow in the park…”

You see what she was doing? With one breath, she was telling me she didn’t want to be found, with the next, she was giving me clues. She was in a park with a weeping willow, and she’d not had her travelcard with her, so she must be walking distance from home.

Ding-a-ling-a-ling! Suddenly an ambulance pressed its priority button, meaning it had something important to say to me on the radio that could not wait. Hurriedly, I summoned a colleague to answer the radio, then turned my attention back to the phone.

“Anna,” I said, “please let us help you. You’ve taken an overdose which is most likely going to kill you if you don’t get to hospital quickly. You’re not going to go to sleep, you’re going to die and if you die you’ll leave your sister devastated and you’ll never see your child again. Is that what you really want?”

“No! I just want to sleep! I just want the pain to end.”

“We can help you. Just tell us where you are.”

“I told you! Under the weeping willow!”

And with that, the line went dead. I tried to call back, but she wouldn’t answer. Seemingly, she was challenging us. She was giving us enough information to work out where she was, but not making it easy for us. We’d have to show that we really wanted to find her by putting some detective work in. I turned my attention back to the radio.

“NE22. I’ve just spent ten minutes on the line to your patient. She’s taken an overdose of tramadol and zopiclone and she’s in a park, walking distance from her address, sitting under a weeping willow. I don’t suppose you have any idea where that might be?”

“Oh, the weeping willow!” said NE22 sardonically. “Right! I reckon there must be about five hundred weeping willows in Walthamstow. We’ll start looking, but this could take some time. Perhaps you’d better notify the police, over.”

Funnily enough, at that exact moment a new ticket came in from the police:

“Uphill Park, E17. Under weeping willow tree. 30yof ? psychiatric, crying hysterically, talking to self.”

I directed NE22 to the park and crossed my fingers. Just because we knew where she was, it didn’t mean we’d find her. After all, it’s easy to hide in a park in the middle of the night if you don’t want to be found.

Five minutes after NE22 arrived at the park, they had Anna on board and were on the way to hospital. I guess she didn’t try too hard to hide. I guess she did want to be found after all.

by Mark Myers at July 04, 2008 08:43 AM

Daily Mail, 2 July 2008

Surely, you think despairingly, this has just got to be a spoof.

A candidate was awarded marks in his GCSE English exam for writing ‘F*** off’ on his paper as a gratuitous profanity.

Perhaps the examiner was making a pointed comment about standards of incivility among the young? Maybe he mistook this exam script for an art installation at Tate Modern?

But no, this was no spoof. It was all too genuine. The candidate’s expletive earned marks for accurate spelling and for conveying a meaning successfully.

Ye gods. It’s not just that this pupil was rewarded for unacceptable and oafish behaviour.

No, the real issue is that education standards have now fallen to such rock-bottom level and examiners’ expectations are so low that they actually find achievement in spelling that four-letter word — which surely does not leave a great deal of room for error.

Nor was the examiner, Peter Buckroyd, some aberrant teacher with a nose-stud and an attitude problem. He is the chief examiner for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance — and has instructed fellow examiners to mark expletives in exactly the same way.

Let me quote you precisely how this important educationist explained his decision to record a level of achievement in the expression of this expletive. ‘It would be wicked to give it zero,’ he said, ‘because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for — like conveying some meaning and some spelling.

‘It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank.’

So this is what our once glorious education system has come to — that if a child writes anything at all on a sheet of paper, examiners are so pathetically grateful, they will award him marks.

What next –prizes for children who scrawl obscene graffiti on the school wall on the grounds that they too are ‘conveying meaning and some spelling’? Bonus points in an exam for the candidate who manages to write his name?

The point about expletives is that far from showing any skill, they demonstrate inarticulacy; the only ‘meaning’ they convey is aggression and rage.

What’s really wicked is an educationist degrading the meaning of achievement and education in this manner, and bringing the exam system into disrepute by a decision which is beyond parody.

But then, the state to which our education system has descended has long been beyond parody. So much of what schoolchildren are now expected to do is a joke.

Too many pass exams by ticking boxes with pictures in them. Too many are told they can read when all they are actually doing is memorising or guessing the words on the page. Too many have never been taught the rules of formal grammar which actually enable them to decode foreign languages.

Heaven forbid they should be taught anything in a structured way which might mean that some children are slower than others to master it — and might therefore suffer crippling self-esteem problems from the trauma for the rest of their lives.

Far better to reduce achievement itself to a farce — which has been the education world’s own great achievement.

According to some teachers, some GCSE tests in French are reduced to little more than an exercise in memorising four words.

Every year, GCSE and A-level results themselves defy the rules of mathematics as they appear to display ever more vertiginous levels of attainment.

Yet the Royal Literacy Fund has described the writing skills of British undergraduates as a public ‘catastrophe’ — undoubtedly because even good A-level grades are being awarded for illiterate and substandard work.

In addition, many exams effectively provide candidates with the answers to their questions, and it is possible to pass some GCSEs with just 20 per cent of the answers correct.

Almost every day brings more news of this catastrophe.

There has been a huge fall in the number of pupils studying foreign languages in English secondary schools, from around 80 per cent when Labour came to power to under half last year.

New research has found that almost one in four secondary schools in England no longer has any specialist physics teachers. Half of these have only a GCSE or A-level in the subject, despite being expected to prepare pupils for university.

This is itself the outcome of decades of dumbing down science teaching. Much of it no longer teaches individual sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology in depth, but provides only general science teaching.

Worse still, this is increasingly replacing scientific knowledge with politicised applied-science issues such as nuclear power or bird flu. Indeed, the curriculum body has actually gloated that the over-14 science curriculum has ‘reduced content and factual recall’.

This whole education farce has been playing now for more than three decades. Attempts by both Tory and Labour politicians to stop the rot have ranged from the ineffectual to the wicked.

This is because the root of the problem is the education establishment; and when it comes to what used to be called the education ministry (before it tellingly removed the very word ‘education’ from its title) the lunatics long ago took over that particular asylum.

So it is successive governments that have helped destroy the very nature of education by replacing knowledge with ’skills’. Children may therefore no longer know a word of French or German, but under a new-style ‘functional’ GCSE they will be able to study travel brochures, magazines and biographies.

In fact, the obsession with ’skills’ has effectively de-skilled the country. For as we all know, to find a plumber who knows enough geometry to do his job properly you now have to employ a Pole.

Instead of knowledge, our anti-education department has been busily promoting something called ‘learnacy’. The idea is that instead of being taught knowledge, children have to learn how to learn.

That means instead of teaching them facts, teachers must build up pupils’ self-esteem and ‘emotional intelligence’. Learnacy — or lunacy?

Education is the very life-blood of a country. If the education system goes down the spout, the country must follow. Yet public outrage about this catastrophe is remarkably muted.

There is one — dismal — reason for this: those in a position to kick up a fuss buy their way out of the system, whether through independent schools, the few good state schools in leafy suburbs or by judicious (and discreet) use of home tutors.

Those who are left high and dry are those without the financial means to play the system like this. And it’s their children, of course, who need excellent schooling the most.

Even some independent schools are being slowly sucked into this spiral of decline. Is it any wonder that this country’s administrative class can no longer run the proverbial whelkstall?

There is only one way to deal with this. That is to remove the power and control of the education elite and transfer that power and control to parents instead.

That means some kind of voucher system for schools.

It means removing teacher training from teacher training institutions, which should be shut down. If it is not true that ‘those who can’t do, teach’, it certainly is true that ‘those who can’t teach, teach the teachers’.

And it means scaling down the Departments of Children, Schools and Families and Innovation, Universities and Skills which, even when they had ‘education’ in their titles, have done nothing but harm for decades.

Britain’s education system? Expletive deleted.

by Melanie Phillips at July 02, 2008 08:59 AM

The new TV comes piling in, some for the summer season, some leaking for next season.

Mark Loves Sharon - ten (Aus)

Mocumentaries are increasingly relevent, as everything on television takes on characteristics of the documentary in some attempt at validity. From the lowest lows of Big Brother, to David Attenborough’s Life In Cold Blood having a ten minute behind-the-scenes doc tagged on the end of each episode, we’re increasingly seeing the cameras filming the cameras. There will presumably come a time when the mocku will become over-saturated, inevitably resulting in a behind-the-scenes look at how their made, when someone will create a spoof behind-the-scenes doc of the moc… In the meantime, they’re few and far between, and those that exist tend to be superb. As is the case here.

Mark Wary is an Australian sporting champion (the programme brilliantly doesn’t nail done in what sport or sports, but keeps implying success in an increasing number of fields) who has become more famous for his behaviour out of the field/ring/stadium. He lives in his giant house with his girlfriend Karen Sharon, who likes to kid herself that she stays with him despite his money and success, and yet for someone reason sticks around despite his constant philandering. His manager, Jerry Dabblestein, provides the comic foil, the straight man in Mark’s life, trying to micromanage his every moment, but spending the majority of his time in damage control for the last couple of incidents. Then there’s Sledge and Tomo, two childhood friends who moved in when he became successful.

It’s odd that it’s the only mocu I can think of spoofing the current spate of celebrity fly-on-the-walls. Perhaps it’s because, as a genre, it’s already so deeply salf-parodying that people don’t feel the need. And if anything, Mark Loves Sharon doesn’t even tiptoe toward going as low as many of the for-real versions. Keeping Up With The Kardashians, or Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, are hard to out do. Instead it focuses on a Ricky Gervais-style of naturalistic conversation and hopelessness. Mark’s constant enthusiasm, and his misplaced confidence that his inept lying will ever work, is great. But best is Jerry’s imprisonment in this vapid world. Like the best creations in this genre you feel sympathy for his horrible job, while at the same time having that niggling feeling he deserves it. His being the smartest of the group isn’t the highest compliment, and during his interviews to camera he reveals that he’s about as redundant as the rest. My favourite example of this was the following, delivered as if a profound observation:

First telephone conversation ever: Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you. Alexander Graham Bell. I don’t think he realised at the time the potential impact phones would have. Especially when they became mobile. Of course nowadays he could simple say, “Mr Watson, stay where you are, I’m sending you a photo. Of my genitalia.”

Wipeout - ABC

Everything about this programme is wrong. It’s the world’s largest assault course! It’s entirely based on those Japanese gameshows we see clips where people hurt themselves on camera for our entertainment. It appears to deliberately pick people incapable of walking in a line, let alone bouncing their way across building-high rubber balls. And it has two campish commentators whose job is to insult everyone. Flipping heck, I enjoyed it.

It’s not worth describing when you can watch it for yourself, so see below:

It turns out you can never get bored of watching people slam their faces into padded platforms before falling fifteen feet into water. This programme is going to be on until someone dies, and then it will never be spoken of again. Until then, I’m going to gleefully enjoy it and not care what type of person this makes me. Best commentary line so far: “She stops before this obstacle to gather her thought.”

Black Gold - Tru TV

If you’re going to rip something off, go the whole way. Black Gold is the oil well drilling copy of the mighty Deadliest Catch. And there’s not one aspect of the Discovery show that isn’t mimicked. There’s an opening theme that sounds like a tribute to DC’s Jovi song, there’s three rival rigs competing to be the first to reach oil, each with its own camera crew. There’s danger, death and people getting fired. Well, actually, there’s one thing they don’t have: Mike Rowe doing the narration. And it’s a big loss, on what’s otherwise a stupifyingly watchable show.

Leverage - TNT

A pilot that promises a fantastic amount. It’s Ocean’s 5, basically. A reluctant team of master thieves teaming up for only one job (fnarr), with double, triple, and quadruple crossing going on between them and their marks. It crams so much into 57 minutes, and is constantly enormous fun. FX tried a thieving show last year with, well, Thief. It was a great concept, but focused on just one job after the first episode, and moved far too slowly. Andre Braugher was of course incredible in it, but it never really found a groove. 2006’s Smith was closer to Leverage, but after a promising pilot descended into drivel. I really hope Leverage can keep up the level it sets here, because its pilot is great. Presumably it will receive an editing to get it down to 42 minutes, or perhaps bump it up to 63.

Meebox - BBC3

If you’ve been following Adam Buxton’s YouTube posts the last couple of years, you’ll probably be excited to see the pilot of the TV version. And then be disappointed to find out the result is a very muddled affair. Added to the clips that worked the best, like the Songs Of Praise subtitles and the frightening Sausages song, are some really awkward sketches that in no way resemble the things people post on online video sites, which is surely the point of the programme? If he couldn’t think of enough clips for a half hour pilot, it seems extremely dubious that there’s a series in this. Which is a huge shame. Especially as he couldn’t get clearance for some of the better stuff, like You Say We Pay.

by botherer at July 01, 2008 02:09 PM

Wall Street Journal, 1 July 2008

It turns out that the U.S., whose Supreme Court last month ruled that non-American prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay may challenge their detention, isn’t the only country where judges are hampering the war on terror.

Many people here are rubbing their eyes at the fact that Britain is letting out of jail some of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members. In June, a British court released the notorious Islamist preacher Abu Qatada, who had spent the previous three years in jail pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial on terrorism charges.

Now there are media reports that the U.K. government is considering releasing an even more dangerous terrorist this week, rather than deporting him to his native Algeria. The man known only as ‘U’ (to protect his identity) was a close contact of Abu Qatada and allegedly was involved in planning terror operations in Los Angeles and Strasbourg, France.

Neither Abu Qatada nor ‘U’ has been prosecuted in Britain, because U.K. authorities possess no evidence to charge these men with plotting terrorist acts. Abu Qatada could have faced charges for lesser offenses under Britain’s terrorism law. But since these would have imposed only short prison sentences, the government considered it preferable to deport him to stand trial for more serious crimes in his home country.

Yet in both cases, the English courts have ruled that deporting these men would breach their human rights. Given that they were only being held pending deportation, their subsequent release became inevitable. These cases are but the latest examples of the way in which the English judiciary appears to be bending over backward to thwart the fight against terrorism.

‘U’ is considered so dangerous that his lawyers and the security service are still arguing over the unprecedented restrictions proposed for his bail, including permanent house arrest. Abu Qatada is free on the conditions that he remains at home for 22 hours every day, doesn’t use a cell phone, and doesn’t visit a mosque.

He now lives in a house in a London suburb, to the undoubted discomfiture of his neighbors. Dozens of police officers are required to ensure that he doesn’t violate his bail conditions, at an estimated annual cost of £500,000 ($996,274). Then there are his wife and five children who have to be supported on welfare benefits, as they have been during the years of his incarceration, at a further cost of some £45,000 per year – not to mention an extra £8,000 annually in disability benefits for Abu Qatada on account of his ‘bad back.’

Britain’s welfare ‘rights’ culture only accentuates the surrealism of this situation. How is it that people as dangerous as these two men are to be maintained at vast expense by the British taxpayer rather than being deported? Puzzlement surely turns into astonishment when one learns the grounds on which the Appeal Court decided not to throw Abu Qatada out of the country.

The judges were worried that, at his pending trial in Jordan, the court there might use evidence from a witness that had been obtained by torturing him. This concern persisted despite the Jordanians’ assurances that they would not do so, since this was against their own law.

Prohibiting torture is one thing. But extending such concerns to a witness in a case in which Britain was not even involved, thus preventing it from throwing out someone who endangered its own interests, is beyond perverse.

No sooner had Abu Qatada been released than yet another set of English judges in a terrorist case arrived at an even more bizarre conclusion. Led by England’s top judge, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, the Appeal Court quashed the conviction of the ‘lyrical terrorist’ Samina Malik.

Ms. Malik had been found guilty of collecting ‘information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’ after a jury heard that she possessed jihadi literature including ‘The Terrorists’ Handbook’ and ‘The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook,’ as well as operators’ manuals for such firearms as an antitank weapon. She is known as the ‘lyrical terrorist’ because she also wrote jihadi poetry.

The judges reversed her conviction, though, because they decided that information ‘useful’ to a terrorist had to offer practical assistance. While the terrorist manuals in her possession plainly did just that, the judges decided that other jihadi literature did not, and so it was not unlawful to possess such literature. They then concluded that the jury may have been ‘confused’ and wrongly convicted her for possessing the jihadi literature – as opposed to convicting her for possessing the terrorism manuals that did constitute an offense.

The debacles over Abu Qatada and ‘U’ have occurred because England’s overwhelmingly liberal senior judges have interpreted the prohibition of torture under the European Convention on Human Rights to include deportation to any country where ill-treatment might be practiced. This has made it all but impossible to deport foreign terrorist suspects, since the Muslim countries they usually come from are hardly scrupulous in observing the rule of law.

It was surely never the intention of the framers of the Convention to force a country to harbor individuals who posed a danger to the national interest. Yet that is what the English judiciary has brought about. These judgments are a clear signal to al Qaeda that Britain remains the safest and most hospitable place on Earth in which to ply their appalling trade.

The Samina Malik case, meanwhile, showed once again that the judges seem unable to grasp the part played in Islamic terrorism of literature which incites hatred and violence toward the West.

The undercurrent to all this is the belief among many members of the British establishment that the threat of Islamic terrorism has been overstated. This notion flies in the face of a statement last November by the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, that there were 2,000 known Islamic terrorists in Britain.

There is much emotional talk about defending Britain’s ancient rights and liberties, whose erosion in the ostensible cause of fighting terror would, it is said, hand victory to al Qaeda. But this view does not chime with British public opinion – which if anything wants the government to take more draconian measures against terrorism. That’s why Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to extend the current 28-day limit for detaining terrorist suspects before charge to 42 days, a measure which the House of Commons recently passed.

So does this mean that the establishment mood on counterterrorism is toughening up? Not a bit. Mr. Brown forced through the 42-days law only with the last-minute help of the handful of Northern Irish Ulster Unionist MPs. Not only his own Labour backbenchers but the Conservative Party and most of the political and intellectual class are solidly against the measure, which is likely to be thrown out when it reaches the upper house of Parliament this month.

It is surely no accident that this failure to grasp the true dimensions of the Islamic terrorist threat is so pronounced among the British elite. For these are the people whose education and careers embody the key attribute of Britain’s liberal society – the belief that the world is governed by rational agents acting in their rational self-interest.

The British ruling class just doesn’t get religious fanaticism. That is why its judges and politicians are finding it so difficult to fight Islamic terror. Not just Britain but the whole world is less safe as a result.

by Melanie Phillips at July 01, 2008 09:40 AM

Daily Mail, 30 June 2008

The stench is becoming overpowering.

Political sleaze scandals are raining down upon us like the unstoppable effluent from a burst sewage pipe.

The leader of the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament, Wendy Alexander, resigned at the weekend over failing to declare donations to her leadership campaign, following a ruling by the Scottish Parliament’s Standards Committee that she should be suspended from Holyrood for one day.

At the same time, the Glasgow East Labour MP David Marshall also resigned his seat — ostensibly on health grounds, but amid allegations that he wrongly used his Commons expenses to pay members of his family.

Both Edinburgh and Westminster are convulsed by these developments. The loss of Gordon Brown’s close ally in Ms Alexander and the prospect of a possibly calamitous by-election in his own Scottish fiefdom are further, possibly terminal blows to an already punch-drunk Prime Minister.

Quite apart from the implications for Gordon Brown’s long-term political survival, however, these latest ructions surely tell us that something rather deeper in our political culture has gone badly rotten.

As a result of Ms Alexander’s resignation, the spotlight now falls again upon the Leader of the Commons Harriet Harman, who was forced to repay £5,000 in illegal donations made to her own deputy leadership campaign.

If Ms Alexander was forced to resign over such behaviour, why is Ms Harman still in office?

After all, Peter Hain is now a distant memory as a Cabinet Minister, having been forced to resign over his illegally undeclared donations for his own deputy leadership campaign.

Is it perhaps mandatory for British politicians now to pocket illegal donations whenever they run for leadership positions in anything?

Ms Harman nevertheless airily dismisses questions about her probity and suitability for high office, and froths instead about her frightening plan to discriminate against men in the workplace.

Such a Kafka-esque proposal by our satirically-styled Equality Minister, who proposes to punish men for a gender pay gap after having illegally plugged her own funding gap, has a whiff of the last days of the Soviet ruling elite as their empire imploded under the pressures of tyranny, corruption and gross incompetence.

Dodgy dealings by politicians are by no means confined to illegal donations, nor to any one party. The Tories can hardly call Labour to account when they themselves are presiding over a string of such scandals going right to the top of the party.

Their chairman, Caroline Spelman, was revealed to have used a parliamentary secretarial allowance to pay her children’s nanny, who she claimed worked as her secretary.

Now — devastatingly — it turns out that she sacked her real secretary, who had been so shocked to find out that Ms Spelman was using this parliamentary allowance to pay the nanny that she reported her to the party whips nine years ago.

In the circumstances, it is simply intolerable that Ms Spelman has not stepped down. Mr Cameron’s failure to acknowledge the patently outrageous nature of this scam demonstrates once more why public cynicism about the entire political class has now reached epidemic proportions.

But Mr Cameron is undoubtedly painfully aware that once one politician goes down for this kind of thing, innumerable others will follow because such practices have become institutionalised.

When Tory MP Derek Conway had the party whip withdrawn for putting his son on the parliamentary payroll, many other MPs nervously felt their collars.

Since then, we have learned that Labour MEP Michael Cashman pays his gay lover £30,000 from public funds to be his secretary; while at least 23 British MEPs employ husbands, wives, civil partners and daughters on their staff, paid for by the public purse.

Then there are all the jaw-dropping housing scams. Tory backbenchers Nick and Ann Winterton were rebuked by the Standards and Privileges Committee for buying a Westminster flat with their Commons allowance and then effectively renting it from themselves.

Labour’s husband-and-wife power couple, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, are being investigated for claiming a second-home allowance to help buy a £655,000 house in North London last year. By designating this as a second home, they qualified for up to £44,000 a year to subsidise the mortgage.

Yet how can this really be their second home, since not only is it unlikely that as Cabinet ministers they spend fewer nights in London than in their Yorkshire constituency house — which, incidentally, between 1999 and 2005 Ms Cooper had declared as their second home — but it is from their London house that their three children go to school?

Now Labour MP John Mann has poured fuel on to those particular flames by claiming that many MPs are claiming second-home allowances on expensive properties and then declaring them as their main home when they sell them to avoid capital gains tax.

And then there are all the lobbying scams. A report from the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner has revealed that several members of the Shadow Cabinet are taking money to run their private offices directly from commercial companies with vested interests in their portfolios.

It is now becoming clear that the ‘Tory sleaze’ of the John Major years was merely the first act in the tragicomedy of modern British politics. The collective snout of the entire political class is now revealed to be deep in the trough.

Of course, this is not new; in previous centuries British politics was mired in corruption. But with the emergence of fully-fledged democracy in the last century, it was reformed to become arguably the cleanest political system in the world.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the erosion of political integrity is intimately related to the erosion of democracy itself in Britain. Politics is falling apart because the national project is falling apart.

Westminster is becoming less and less important. So much power has been transferred to Europe — where the absence of democratic accountability and transparency has instituted a gravy train of endemic corruption which, in turn, has washed back into Britain.

In addition, Britain itself is in danger of fragmenting, as we can see from the skilful way in which the Scottish Nationalist leader Alex Salmond is manipulating events — which is why there is panic in the Labour ranks over the Glasgow East by-election. As sceptical voices warned at the time, devolution has set in train a dynamic of separation that is going to be difficult to stop.

With Westminster thus enfeebled, British politics increasingly attracts moral and intellectual pygmies. As a result, the idea of politics as a duty to serve the public good has all but gone, replaced by a culture of everyone out for him or herself.

The result is unbridled greed and self-interest, exceeded only by a monumental arrogance which leads politicians to believe that they are entitled to feather their own nests and are outraged that anyone should call them to account.

The outcome is an electorate terminally disillusioned with mainstream politics — illustrated by the astounding result in the Henley by-election where Labour was beaten into fifth place by the racist British National Party.

Endemic sleaze is a symptom of decay, not just for a beleaguered Prime Minister but for a democracy itself that is in trouble.

by Melanie Phillips at June 30, 2008 06:00 AM

I will never understand why some people think it is funny or clever to hoax call the emergency services. Hoax calls cost lives. Whilst ambulance crews drive round in circles trying to find patients that don’t exist and accidents that never happened, and control staff waste hours on the phone trying to determine the location of fictitious incidents, other, genuine patients are put in danger.

The vast majority of hoaxes come from children, most of whom, I hope, get a stern talking to from their parents when the ambulance turns up (children tend not to realise that we can trace any landline call, and the owner of any registered mobile!) and never do it again. There are also a fair few from older teenagers, who, I’m guessing, are doing it for a dare. This type of hoax is pretty easy to spot; the diagnosis is usually blurted out in a rehearsed manner and involves “someone” and a medical diagnosis rather than the more usual description of what has happened. (”Someone’s broken their leg!” as opposed to “My brother fell down the stairs and his leg hurts!”) The caller usually hangs up on further questioning, usually without giving an address. If they do give an address, it’s usually a main road. I can’t ever remember taking a hoax call and not realising it was a hoax at the time, which makes it all the more frustrating because unless we’ve already been to the address that day, we have to treat every single call as if it were genuine.

Somewhat more sinister are the regular hoaxers. We’ve had a few of thesever the years. Some have been prosecuted but some we never find. If a caller uses an unregistered mobile or a payphone to call, it’s pretty much impossible to trace them. There was one young woman who called us every night for months, giving an address near her own every time. When she was eventually traced it was found she was mentally ill and had an obsession with ambulances. Her bedroom wall was covered with pictures of them and she was calling 999 just so she could see one outside. There was also a spate of hoaxes to one address which were believed to be coming from the ex partner of the person who lived there. They always gave outlandish reasons such as “house on fire” “plane crash” and on one occasion, “my wife has cut my testicles off and cooked them in the over”.

This week, we’ve been utterly inundated with calls from possibly the most annoying hoaxer ever. He’s been calling us for a couple of months now, but this week the call rate has gone through the roof. I’d say he is calling a couple of hundred times a day. Each call taker will end up speaking to him around ten times per shift. Of course, we’ve had his mobile cut off, but he just goes out and buys a new one, and he’s back again. He gives his address as 20, [long and well known road], E1. The address he gives doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist - the road covers more than one postal area, and number 20 isn’t in E1. In actual fact, as we discovered the first time we were called out there, number 20 is a Woolworths.

This guy thinks he is *hilarious*. He loves to give his diagnosis as “itchy penis” and I think this is just because he is amused by the word “penis”. Sometimes he will just call up and laugh and say that he needs an ambulance because he or his girlfriend (surely a moron like this cannot possibly have a girlfriend?) cannot stop laughing. Sometimes he will just sing his “address” at us and laugh hysterically. He knows that we cannot hang up on someone if they say they need an ambulance so he will always maintain that he needs an ambulance, despite rarely giving a coherent reason for doing so. Lately, he has given up on giving any medical reasons for needing us whatsoever - instead he will alternately offer the call taker a banana, or request that a banana is brought to him. According to one rather exasperated emergency operator I spoke to, when asked “Emergency, which service? Police, fire or ambulance?” he replied “Greengrocer”.

If I didn’t think it would lose me my job, I would quite happily post Mr Banana’s phone number up on my blog and encourage every single reader to call him, preferably at 3 in the morning, and offer him random items of fruit and veg and see how HE likes it.

by Mark Myers at June 27, 2008 03:27 PM

Standpoint, July 2008

On September 30 2000, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead.

That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

It was, in short, a modern-day blood libel, an updated version of the medieval calumny that the Jews target gentile children for murder — which itself caused the murder of thousands of Jews over the centuries.

How do we know the footage was a lie? Because many of us have seen the evidence for ourselves in a French courtroom. Ironically, this blood libel was only exposed to public view because France 2 and its correspondent Enderlin brought a libel suit against a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, for saying that the ‘killing’ was ‘pure fiction’ and that al-Dura wasn’t dead at all.

To begin with, a Paris court ruled in favour of the TV station. But in May this year, the appeal court ruled that Karsenty had every right to say what he said in the light of the evidence. This included the ‘inexplicable incoherence’ of footage, whose images did not correspond to Enderlin’s commentary; the ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ in Enderlin’s explanation; and the lack of credibility of France 2’s Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, upon whose account of the events at Netzarim Enderlin — who was in Jerusalem at the time — had depended.

Denis Jeambar, the director of L’Express, and TV producer Daniel Leconte saw the untransmitted rushes and subsequently wrote in Le Figaro: ‘In the minutes that precede the gunfire, the Palestinians seem to have organised a staged scene. They “play” at war with the Israelis and simulate, in most of the cases, imaginary injuries.’ At the moment when Enderlin declared the boy to be dead: ‘Nothing permitted him to affirm that he was really dead and even less that he was killed by Israeli soldiers.’

The implications for France 2 are shattering. The state-funded TV station is now appealing to the highest court in France. Enderlin has blustered that Karsenty is backed by US and French ‘right-wing’, pro-Israel organisations. This is the desperate flailing of a journalist whose reputation now lies in shreds. For he never imagined that his attempt to silence Karsenty would lead the court to order France 2 to produce the evidence it had hitherto refused to make public — the untransmitted 27 minutes of footage that Abu Rahma claimed he had filmed.

I was in the Paris court on the day France 2 reluctantly complied and I saw the footage (minus a few minutes that Enderlin had excised and which are said to be even more explosive). This showed clearly that the whole thing was a set-up from start to finish.

The cameraman said the Israelis had fired continuously for 45 minutes. Yet the footage did not show people falling under fire. It showed instead Palestinians demonstrating, throwing rocks and so forth, in a positively carnival atmosphere. Youths strutted about, giving declamatory interviews and grinning at the camera; boys rode by on bicycles. And no one showed any sign of injury. There were no wounds; there was no blood. From time to time, demonstrators were pushed on to stretchers and into ambulances — but with no evidence of any disturbance to their anatomy.

Enderlin said he had cut out the scenes of al-Dura’s actual death agony because ‘it was unbearable’. But when the footage was shown, it became clear no such scenes existed. There was no agony and no death. Al-Dura and his father showed no sign of any wound or injury throughout. Supposedly riddled with bullets, their bodies remained totally unmarked. There was no blood anywhere. A red stain on the child turned out to be a piece of red cloth, which suddenly materialised.

You see the boy slumping to the ground. But before he does so, while he is still hanging on to his father and screaming, a voice shouts in Ara bic: ‘The boy is dead! The boy is dead!’ Asked to explain this astounding prescience, Enderlin’s team replied that the Arabic in fact meant: ‘The boy is in danger of dying.’ At this, the courtroom laughed out loud.

After Enderlin pronounces the boy to be dead, the corpse mysteriously assumes four different positions. You see the cameraman’s fingers making the ‘take two’ sign to signal the repeat of a scene. And then you see the lifeless martyr raise his arm and peep through his fingers — presumably to check whether his thespian services are still required or whether he can now get up and go home.

This extraordinary footage was first uncovered by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist in Israel’s defence establishment, who was at the centre of the Israeli army’s own investigation of the incident. Shahaf analysed frame by frame the untransmitted rushes from many TV crews.

He observed, from pictures of al-Dura’s autopsy, that the state of the body suggested he had been dead for at least a day; that this boy was older than 12; and that although there were bullet holes in his forehead, there had been no blood on the ground nor on the wall behind him. He also noted, from pictures of the boy’s funeral on the day of the shooting, that shadows indicated this took place around midday. He was told by two doctors at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital that al-Dura’s lifeless body was brought to them before 1pm. But the incident at Netzarim had not started until 3pm.

Shahaf then discovered from al-Shifa’s records that a dead boy named Rami Jamal al-Dura had been brought into the hospital the day before. According to Palestinian TV and the earliest accounts of the incident, the full name of the boy who was killed at Netzarim was Mohammed Rami Jamal al-Dura.

Shahaf concludes: ‘It was just lie after lie after lie.’ He also found several short films shot in the Netzarim area on and around the day of the incident. ‘They used directors, cameramen and volunteer actors,’ he said. ‘You can see them shooting little horror scenes. Often the director scolds the volunteers for their bad acting. The wounded get up and go back for another take; Palestinian bystanders laugh and applaud.’

The implications of this scandal are enormous, going far beyond a disgraced journalist and his TV station. For France itself, it raises a century-old spectre. In 1894, a Jewish French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted for treason on fabricated evidence that he was a spy, in an atmosphere of institutionalised state antisemitism. The al-Dura libel is being seen in some quarters as a second Dreyfus affair — but with Israel playing the role of the defamed army captain.

This perception of France’s revived shame was given fuel by the extraordinary behaviour of the lower court, which found Karsenty guilty of libel. For most of that trial, it had looked as if France 2 would lose, not least because it had failed to answer any of Karsenty’s allegations. But at the last minute, Enderlin’s team produced a letter to Enderlin from the then French President, Jacques Chirac, extolling him as a brilliant and authoritative journalist. As a result, the three judges promptly found for France 2.

This disgraceful piece of political nobbling and judicial grovelling has now been reversed by the higher court. But few in France would realise this — what scant coverage there has been of this judgment managed to suggest that the integrity of the al-Dura footage remained intact.

It’s not just the French media that is in the frame here. Over the years, Shahaf’s findings made their way into a handful of newspaper articles, TV documentaries and on to the internet; yet this evidence was studiously ignored by the rest of the media.

It is the most egregious example of the animosity towards Israel of much of the Western media, which routinely reports Palestinian or Hezbollah propaganda as fact and refuses to correct the record whenever these falsehoods are exposed. One thinks of the Jenin ‘massacre’ that never was, or the evidence revealing that alleged Israeli atrocities during the 2006 Lebanon war were either staged by Hezbollah or significantly embellished. Indeed, the presentation of theatrical fictions as Israeli atrocities has become so widespread that the practice has been dubbed ‘Pallywood’ — a grotesque new genre of terrortainment.

Why do Western journalists go along with such deadly fabrications? The answer lies in a combination of their dislike of Israel, professional self-preservation, and the fact that they depend on local stringers who are virtually all partisans of the Arab and Islamist cause.

According to Danny Seaman, director of the Israel government press office, almost every stringer now delivering local copy and images from Gaza to Western journalists answers to Hamas. Western journalists know that if they cross Hamas, their lives will be in danger — and British journalists, Seaman says, are the most compliant of all.

Palestinian stringers in general, he says — who all see their role as propagandists for the Palestinian cause — have virtually taken over foreign media offices. The result is that footage from Gaza has long been routinely fabricated or doctored, to which practices Western media organisations turn a blind eye. ‘These were good pictures, always getting on the front pages and eliciting an emotional response,’ says Seaman. ‘ “Bad Jews, poor Arabs” sold papers. Then it became so much the reality that no one ever challenged it.’

What Western dupes fail to realise is that Pallywood is a key weapon in the asymmetrical warfare being waged against Israel and the West. Realising they cannot achieve victory by conventional military means, the Palestinians and Islamists use psychological warfare — psy-ops — as a key strategy both to recruit their army of terrorists, and to demoralise, confuse and suborn their victims.

Israel fails to grasp that it is in a psy-ops war — hence its ineptitude in reacting to the al-Dura claims. Within hours, the Israeli army assumed it must be responsible for the boy’s ‘death’ — and said so without even questioning the commander on the ground. It then set up an investigation, which concluded that its soldiers could not have been responsible. But it left it at that for seven years, despite Shahaf’s discoveries.

Although Seaman said repeatedly during that time that the boy’s ‘killing’ was a fabrication, he was slapped down by Israel’s foreign ministry. It decided that the al-Dura image had taken on a life of its own, and so anything that reminded people of that image would be bad for Israel. It failed to grasp that if left unchallenged, that life of its own would cause the deaths of untold numbers of Israelis and other innocents.

Even after the startling developments in the French appeal court, Israel’s government has said nothing (although it has now quietly let it be known that it agrees with its own spokesman Seaman). Similarly in Britain, at time of writing, no daily newspaper has reported any of this; and around the world, only a handful of papers has done so. So the public is unaware that images that have convinced such a lamentable number of them of Israel’s iniquity are false, and that the iniquity belongs instead to the Arabs and the Western media.

In medieval times, the Christian blood libels led to the annihilation of Jews. Today, al-Dura and other similar libels are promoting the annihilation of the collective Jew in the form of the state of Israel. The Western media have shown themselves once again to be the Islamists’ most powerful weapon against the free world on what few realise is the real battleground of the mind.

by Melanie Phillips at June 27, 2008 07:52 AM

Channel 4 News’s anchorman has to disguise his political bias as neutrality, a pretence that is both insidious and unmanly

More here

by Nick at June 26, 2008 10:08 AM

It will take fresh pressure and incentives to douse fears of a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities that would inflame the region Published in the Guardian...

June 25, 2008 11:25 AM

Daily Mail, 23 June 2008

The runes are being read — and from their mysteriously coded message some discern the dim outline of a Tory shift back to common sense over selection in schools.

On a visit last week to Trafford, which maintains both selective and comprehensive schools, the Tory schools spokesman Michael Gove declared robustly that grammar schools must be ‘absolutely defended’.

Last year there was uproar in the party when its then schools spokesman, David Willetts, blamed grammar schools for entrenching disadvantage by preventing poor children from getting a good education.

The magnitude of the ensuing row exposed a deep fissure within the Conservative ranks between two totally opposed world-views. The Tory rank-and-file went ballistic, Trafford’s MP Graham Brady resigned from the front bench in protest, and the hapless Mr Willetts was dispatched to the policy Siberia of ‘Innovation, Universities and Skills’.

A compromise was hastily cobbled together in which, although selection was to play no role in Tory education policy, existing grammar schools would be allowed to continue and new ones to open in areas which already had them.

Mr Gove insists that his words betoken no change to that policy. But choosing Mr Brady’s constituency to declare that it would be ‘foolish not to learn’ lessons for the state system from the success of grammars (and other good schools) was surely not accidental.

Mr Brady clearly thinks the gesture signals a new willingness at least to discuss whether it is practical to allow an element of selection in schools. If so, this is not before time.

The Government continues to try to destroy the grammar schools by attrition. Recently, it announced financial incentives for them to take over poorly performing comprehensives.

Despite implicitly acknowledging the grammar schools’ unique value, such an arrangement would very likely stretch them to the point of destruction.

Last week the (independent school educated) Children’s Secretary Ed Balls accused grammar schools of condemning thousands of pupils in non-selective schools to educational failure.

In fact, the very opposite is true. Evidence obtained by Graham Brady shows that, among state schools inspected by Ofsted, most of those rated ‘outstanding’ were in areas which contained some grammar schools.

Previous research has similarly shown that, in areas where there are still grammar schools, comprehensives often get better results than similar schools in totally non-selective areas. So the old chestnut that by ‘creaming off’ the most able children grammar schools cripple local non-selective schools is just not true.

Grammar schools are in fact the best way out of social disadvantage because they offer the most opportunities for poor but bright children to excel. In any event, one kind of selection or another invariably goes on in schools, whether through the cost of local houses, school interviews or the specific entry criteria that characterise Labour’s prized city academies.

Academic selection is fairest because it matches the school to the overall ability of the child. While few would want to return to the 11-plus, the best arrangement would be to have different types of school, including those selecting by academic ability, which allowed children to move in and out of them throughout their education.

After all, this happens in Europe where there are few selection hang-ups. Indeed, one has to wonder why there is such an animus in Britain.

The answer lies in the way the British intelligentsia turned against this country after World War II and decided to remake society from scratch. It wanted to create a brave new world without any divisions between people and with everyone on the same level.

With equality redefined as a kind of identically, the comprehensive school became an article of faith. The same ideology infected what children were actually taught in the classroom, and the very idea that some children might achieve more than others became anathema.

Mr Balls claims that the grammar schools make pupils at other schools feel like failures. This is exactly the same sentimentalised twaddle that has condemned hundreds of thousands of children to illiteracy and ignorance for fear that teaching them in the most effective way would hurt the feelings of those who were slower than others. So rather than hurt any child’s feelings, all were given prizes.

This obsession with not separating sheep from goats has caused the dumbing-down and leveling-down that have crippled the life chances of countless thousands of children, the vast majority of them from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. They have been comprehensively betrayed.

If ever there were a cause for the Conservative party, this is surely it. For the abolition of meritocracy, as exemplified by the bullying philistinism of Mr Balls, is the precondition for the state control of individuals and reshaping of society which the Conservatives — if they stand for anything at all — are surely in business to fight.

That’s why, for so many, the grammar schools are not some tiresome anachronism but a defining cause.

So why have the Tories gone in the other direction? One answer is that some of them don’t see the need to fight these egalitarian (and frankly totalitarian) attitudes because they too have come to share them.

Above all, however, they are terrified that Labour would seize upon support for grammar schools as evidence that the Tories are still concerned only with the haves rather than the have-nots. Indeed, the fact that selective education was a defining Tory cause was the main reason why it was ditched.

It’s all part of the safety-first Cameroon ‘modernisation’ agenda, which says the Tories have to go with the flow of social change or else Labour will have a field-day. But that is the politics of lame imitation, born out of the timidity that arises from an absence of anything original to say.

It is this demonstrable absence of selfconfidence which explains why the Tories - although benefiting hugely from the implosion of Gordon Brown — have not yet persuaded the public that they stand for a clear and coherent alternative.

By going with the flow on grammar schools or anything else, they give the impression that they are on the defensive and are therefore weak and not to be trusted.

But there is every reason to go on the offensive against Labour over grammar schools. After all, it is this Labour government which has enabled fewer young people from the most deprived backgrounds to go to good universities and caused social mobility to go backwards.

It is Mr Balls who therefore should be on the back foot over selection. And so the Tories need to shift their position.

Mr Gove’s idea of freeing up school provision as they do in Sweden — which has a system where schools operate independently of the state and where they compete for pupils — is basically the kind of bold policy the Tories need to advance.

However, it is undermined by the Tories’ refusal to bestow upon Britain the freedom that does not exist in Sweden to start selective schools.

All Mr Gove needs to do is move his geographical pointer a bit farther along the map to the Netherlands to find a progressive country where selective schools are part of an education system driven, as it should be, by parental choice rather than state control.

Academic selection lies at the very heart of intellectual achievement, social justice and individual aspiration. They are impossible without it. That’s why it is a totemic issue by which any party aspiring to government must be judged.

Let us hope therefore that Mr Gove’s runic ruminations do indeed presage an end to the Tories’ selective amnesia, and they rediscover their historic purpose of defending this society against those who would destroy it.

by Melanie Phillips at June 23, 2008 06:21 AM

I’m really glad it’s not 1974. I like gadgets. And I’m not entirely clear how everyone didn’t live in constant fear that everyone they knew was dead, not having mobile phones or any of the three thousand other methods of instant communication. Nevermind the fashion, and tidalwaves of brown. Swingtown has the fashion, the music, and the brown in abundance, but somehow isn’t a cloying nostalgia-fest. In fact, it’s remarkably sparing with key news events to flag the era.

Bruce and Susan Miller (Jack Davenport struggling with an American accent, and Deadwood’s Molly Parker being endlessly brilliant in every scene) are a couple with teenage kids who move into a wealthier neighbourhood, a few blocks from their previous home. They leave behind Janet and Roger, former best friends of the family, and immediately befriend new neighbours, Tom and Trina. Who immediately introduce them to the world of swinging, something Bruce and Susan, inspired by quaaludes and booze, go along with.

It’s a lot like Pretty/Handsome in that it’s such a well written and performed drama that it’s central premise isn’t the reason to watch. Much more interesting are the conflicts all around it. Janet and Roger are both jealous of Bruce and Susan’s new lives in their own ways, Susan outwardly hostile and Roger inwardly confused. Their son Rick and Bruce and Susan’s son B.J. are best friends, but reaching puberty and with distance between them are trying to work out what shape their friendship will now take. Laurie, the Miller’s teenage daughter, has a crush on her young English teacher, and it looks like it might not only be one way. And there’s something more significant going on in Trina’s life than she’s letting on, as if her open marriage isn’t quite the bliss she suggests.

But of course the sex is key, and if the really engaging and sharply written drama falls down anywhere, it’s that it’s on terrestrial TV. CBS is not the natural home for a show focused around sex, and the awkwardness of trying to depict couples in bed, sometimes more than one couple at a time, in a way that won’t see them have to hand the company over to the regulatory bodies is breaking the programme’s back. The result is that staple of television: the bed sheet constantly pulled up to the woman’s neck, no matter what’s going on. It just ends up looking very silly. Clearly it’s pushing boundaries, and will likely get itself in trouble with every grumbling group of right-wing “save the family” lunatics (or “the FCC” as they’re known), but it really is a show that belongs on HBO where it would be able to relax.

It’s telling that a programme that seems to be going out of its way not to lapse into tiresome “REMEMBER THE 70S? THEY WERE DIFFERENT!!!” nostalgic nonsense, has a title sequence that couldn’t be more the opposite. Thank goodness it’s all concentrated into those 30 seconds, but you can tell there’s executives sniffing around desperate to make it into something they can sell more easily. On-screen captions advertising that you can listen to the programme’s soundtrack again on Last.FM are remarkably incongruous.

Molly Parker is remarkable. Every scene she’s in is stunning, her internal conflict and confused emotions never cloying or cliched. A scene in the third episode, where responding to her belief that Bruce is having an affair she demands a family breakfast and then drags him and the kids to church, could have been hideous. But as out of character as the moment is, you believe in her panic. And unlike every other programme dealing with marital difficulties, Susan quickly confronts the subject with Bruce and the matter is resolved.

The morality of the central subject is handled so well, with the extremely liberal Tom and Trina countered by the deeply conservative Janet and Roger, and then given intelligent balance through Bruce and Susan (who by the beginning of the second episode make a pact to never swing again - clearly a pact that will be revisited, but not one the show is rushing to get to). Hopefully the refusal to be a I Love The 70s fest won’t hinder its ratings (and it does remember to throw in references to fondu sets and Dylan concerts, and has already joined every other hour-long drama ever by having a closing montage to You Can’t Always Get What You Want), and it gets picked up for an in-season run.

by botherer at June 22, 2008 03:55 PM

It’s leaky pilot season, earlier than ever this year.

Life On Mars - ABC

ABC’s remake of the BBC series is peculiarly similar. As in, word-for-word in some scenes. Even shot for shot occasionally. Except, thank goodness, the American version does it without constantly lapsing into utter, utter awful cliche. Instead it’s just slightly awful cliche, and presumably more palatable to my English tastes as American shows always have that extra degree of unreality. Impressively, neither show falls into the “everything from the 1970s happened on this day” that most shows fall into. (See Journeyman for this. Or at its absolute worst, the recent execrable Indiana Jones film).

But for an excellent example of the improvements made by the US version, take the scene when the cops are interviewing the old lady who makes reference to the noise from her neighbour’s music finally stopping. It is at that point that they, and we, make the connection between this fact and the soundproofing material found under the victims’ fingernails. In the US version the moment is electric, they glance, and they move. In the UK version they do a remarkably embarrassing double-take, just shy of the noise of a ruler being twanged, and then jump over the desk in slow motion.

As an ABC show, it’ll be interesting to see how they spin a 12 episode story into a 22/24 part first season. Hopefully they’ll have the sense to move away from the UK material post-pilot. They’ve already made some dramatic improvements, not least removing the focus from the Carry On levels of “oooh, weren’t the police sexist” the BBC version constantly slaps about the viewer’s face. There’s also a great deal more visual imagination with the invasions of modern-day hospital noises and out-of-context characters. And the final scene of the first episode - the jumping sequence - thank goodness it was completely re-written to not be half-arsed dreadfulness. In fact, it shows that the scene can have some genuine gravitas, and far more effectively muddle you about Sam’s reality. Life On Mars was always a really brilliant idea, unfortunately suffocated by the BBC’s insistence on stagomg everything as if it’s about to turn into Confessions Of A Window Cleaner. It might have a chance of escaping this in the US. And Colm Meaney is over four thousand times better as DI Gene Hunt.

Fringe - Fox

When Chris Carter created his pilot about FBI agents who investigate unexplained phenomenon, he crafted a subtle, funny, and most importantly, original show. Mulder, his open-minded FBI agent had been given too much freedom to explore his nutball ideas, and was assigned a skeptical partner whose job was to reel him in. But he was left with extraordinary freedom, and while his bosses disapproved, he got his way.

When J.J. Abrams created his pilot about an FBI agent who investigates unexplained phenomenon, he somewhat forgot the subtle, the funny, and oddly enough, the original. But oh good grief, there’s no shortage of the cliches and exposition. His Olivia Dunham is forced into having infinite freedom to do anything she likes with the help of the institutionalised Dr. Walter Bishop, and his reluctant son, Peter. Together the three of them run around with high-beam torches, investigating a dreadful story about a strange pathogen causing people’s bodies to go transparent. And Dunham’s boyfriend has the disease! There’s some extended gibberish about hooking her up mentally to him, and what was presumably supposed to be hilarious sequences with a dairy cow in their laboratory. It’s hopeless, and so shameless an X-Files clone that you have to wonder if the writers think Carter’s creation was an obscure deep cable show that no one would notice their ripping off. The writers of Transformers, it should be stressed.

But standing out most is the dialogue. Oh boy. Here are some choice highlights.

Dunham: I’m an inter-agency liason.
Grumpy Black FBI Boss Cliche: Liii-ason on an interrr-agency taskforce. Gotta love that. Kinda like powdered sugar on a glased donut.

“What kind of terrorism is this?” someone shouts in zeitgeisty horror. The oh-so earnest reply,
“Who says it’s terrorism?!”

There’s no end of people shrieking, “EFF BEE EYE!”, and at one point it peaks with,

“FREEZE, FBI! FBI, FREEZE! I HAVE A GUN, I WILL SHOOT!”

But my favourite line was Dunham idly chatting with someone about Grumpy Black FBI Boss Cliche:

“Bastard. He’s pissed because his best friend sexually assaulted three marine privates and I’m the bad guy because I put him away.”

Apparently Fox were interested to find out what people thought of the leak. To answer that question: spend another $10,000,000 editing the hell out of it. I think there’s a show in there somewhere, but flipping heck, it’s not that edit.

True Blood - HBO

This is a deeply weird one. Vampires “came out” two years ago, and society is trying to figure out how they fit in. With a massive lack of trust, naturally. But it’s HBO, so there’s unending swearing and a good few boobs. The leaked pilot is very unfinished, with entire scenes missing, so it’s not yet fair to criticise its confusing plotting. The programme, bizarrely, is about a girl who can read minds. She works in a small American town bar, a town that has its first vampire move in. More bizarrely, it’s Anna Paquin playing the telepathic waitress - Rogue from the X-Men movies.

The allegory for the vampire “coming out” is heavy-handed, but it does bring some excellent new phrases. “Fang-banging” is when humans seek sex with vampires. And vampires “came out the coffin.” There’s some rather awkward HBO tail eating, beginning with a horribly forced Bill Maher interview, and later someone even referencing something “being like an HBO show.” It needs some hefty tightening up, and could do with losing about a third of its scenes before it’s finished.

Raising The Bar - TNT

Odd one this. A lawyer show about lawyers doing lawyering, without a single original feature, that’s completely watchable and oddly engaging.

The Middleman - ABC Family

Not a leak, but an aired episode. And one of the best things I’ve seen in forever. Imagine Joss Whedon banter in a Brian Fuller world. Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s graphic novel, about a struggling artist who gets hired to work for a secret organisation that deals with monsters and evildoers, is brought to TV by JGM himself. It’s just lovely, constantly beautifully written, as Wendy Watson learns the ropes of her new job from The Middleman, a stoic, endlessly calm agent who speaks like a gosh-darned 1940s comic hero.

A real highlight of the episode, made family-friendly throughout, is the swearing. Watson, exasperated by the Middleman’s remarkable politeness in the face of extraordinary circumstances, lets loose a volley of swearing, entirely bleeped and even black bars appearing to block her mouth. It’s a programme that’s heftily self-aware of its santised nature, and plays on it wonderfully.

There’s a clear lack of budget, but despite this CGI sets are really evocative. A laboratory has a giant, multi-storey contraptions that looks as though it were built by Fisherprice. But just so it’s clear, this is an episode about a gorilla terrorising the mafia. Yes. It’s adorable, and hilarious. It’s the best thing since Pushing Daisies, and deserves a kerbillion viewers.

Pretty/Handsome - FX

Nip/Tuck (a show I’ve never seen) creator Ryan Murphy creates, writes and directs a new show for confused cable channel FX (wants to be HBO, isn’t deep cable enough to be HBO). It’s about a gynaecologist (Joseph Fiennes), his complicated, upper-middle-class family (although you’d think being married to Carrie-Ann Moss would help), and his secret cross-dressing. Clearly that’s the hook, the premise at its pitch, that the dude wears panties. But oddly it’s everything else about the programme that’s so good. If anything, you could remove the T-V story and you’d have a really strong family drama. The older son’s highschool girlfriend has hidden her pregnancy and is now at 8 months, the younger son is ten, but with an adult IQ, and is attempting to get interested in girls, and his father (and partner in his surgery) is cheating on his mom. Fiennes and Moss are having issues in the bedroom, and Fiennes is faced with a pre-op transexual wanting him to give him/her a hysterectomy, and all the accompanying complications that would arise from that in such a Republican neighbourhood.

The programme is at its weakest whenever it focuses on Fienne’s underwear. Fantastic dialogue and decent perfomances give way to clogged up cliche. The biggest problem is the impression that we’re supposed to think Fiennes is being faced with issues over his desire to cross dress for the first time, despite incessant flashbacks telling us he’s been compelled to wear women’s clothing since childhood. Talk of sex change operations causes him to stop in his tracks, dumbfounded as if suddenly struck by the notion. But of course he’d have encountered the subject numerous times before. Just because we’ve invaded his life at this point should not reset his experiences to zero.

However, it comes together nicely when Fiennes and Moss go to a Halloween party dressed as the opposite sex, with the first decent pay-off for the key subject matter. Fiennes’ opportunity to dress as he desires in public results in enhancing his relationship with his wife. Sadly this gives way to an enormously awful final scene, where the ten year old explains to the family that his recently acquired pet seahorses have the male carry the young, etc etc blah blah sigh.

“Why not call the chick seahorse the guy and the guy seahorse the chick?”
“Because nature, at its best, is complicated.”

How very convenient for him to have just happened to adopt pets that provide such a perfect metaphor! Presumably in episode two he’ll add some Wrinkled Frogs (Rana rugosa dontcha know) and we can all learn how they’re able to change sex if the needs arise. In fact, if Murphy hears of this I bet he’ll kick himself. “That metaphor would have been even more laboured!” Anyway, stupid ending to a really strong programme.

Do Not Disturb - Fox

There was a nagging feeling of familiarity all the way through the pilot of Fox’s new sitcom hopeful about a five-star hotel in New York, and its staff of mismatched misfits. It was toward the end, when the big fat girl who wasn’t allowed to work with the public because she was so big and fat, burst into song to prove her worth even though she was big and fat, that I recognised it: it’s the sitcom Andy makes in the second series of Extras. Admittedly a middle-class version, but the face-pulling, woeful-stereotyping and grotesquely false pathos are all in place.

Jerry O’Connell, who last year was just so brilliant in Carpoolers, plays Andy (his character really is also called Andy) - the gurning, overwhelmed manager of the hotel, bossed around by his female staff even though they’re only women, and always in fear of his tyranical father-figure and hotel owner. Niecy Nash is his fiesty black second-in-command Rhonda, and she sure is black and fiesty! Then there’s Larry, who we find out when overhearing a conversation with someone who is obviously his partner is… gay! A real gay in a TV show! But just in case the look-at-us knowing reference to a male on the phone wasn’t enough, it’s spelt out for us when he shouts, “I KNOW WE’RE GAY!” Stunning. There’s Nicole, a stick-thin member of the front desk staff, whose character arc appears to be played out in the opening episode when her entire personality is transformed from epic bitch to lovely friend. (It’s an unashamed attempt to mimic Amanda from Ugly Betty - one of the most sophisticated and beautifully written and performed characters on television today - it’s safe to say they don’t quite achieve this). And there’s the big and fat Molly, who is big, and also fat.

Without a scrap more personality for anyone, what results is 22 minutes of racist, homophobic and sexist remarks, all apparently justified because the people who say them are ignorant. We’re supposed to be laughing at them, not with them, as they regurgitate gross stereotypes, which makes it all okay. Of course, we’re not laughing at all.

The story, such as it was, appeared to be about how Andy only wants pretty girls to work on the front desk, and how Molly is big and fat, and that those two don’t match. This builds to the point where Molly is threatening a justified lawsuit, and then is given an opportunity to expose Andy in front of the press, but in the most hideous scene imaginable, backs down from all this in order to maintain the status quo. That’s right Molly, don’t get ideas above your station, you are big and fat after all. Instead they both hilariously fall down the stairs together, and in this pratfall we’re supposed to move on from the “know your place, fatty” theme of the episode. Then when whining about how she wants to be a singer for a second time, she’s told, “people don’t need to see you to know you’re a good singer.” Just wow. She says, “What am I supposed to do, answer the phone like this…” and then warbles in a voice that would get her to seventh place in American Idol before they voted off the ugly ones, while the cast stare in gobsmacked amazement, and the audience shrieks in delight at this glimmer of talent appearing on stage. Molly is justified as a human being even though she’s fat. She’s allowed to be visible once a week or something, because she can sing, and er, I dunno, it was the longest 22 minutes of my life and I sort of lost track.

How on earth did Jason Bateman (director) and Abraham Higginbotham (writer) create this ghastly, offensive mess? Arrested Development it is not. In fact, it’s about as opposite a sitcom as you could imagine.

by botherer at June 21, 2008 09:21 PM

Obama has gone back on his pledge to stay within the public financing system. A U-turn, yes, but one that won't hurt him From the Guardian's Comment is Free...

June 20, 2008 11:27 AM

My friend Tarek is doing a daily cartoon strip for an English language newspaper in Cairo. I seem to have made a couple of guest appearances: here and here.

by levine at June 20, 2008 01:05 AM

"Fighting evil, so you don't have to."

It isn't often that a decent show appears in the summer television schedules. Relegation to the off-season can be a sign that the show isn't good enough attract viewers during the regular TV season. Or it may simply be too offbeat for the same. These are swiftly-cancelled filler, disappearing without complaint or quirky annoying peanut-posting campaigns. Then there are those which defy expectations. Bona fide hits, such as Mad Men, are rare; the more likely route to longevity is to become a cult favourite. ABC Family's The Middleman seems destined—indeed, designed—to fit snugly into this last category. Too goofy for the mainstream, it's also hampered by a budget that even the most basic of basic cable hour-longs might be ashamed of. But what it has in spades is charm and a lack of preciousness which lifts it above the unoriginal premise and similar, more self-consciously offbeat fare. Enough, at least, to ensure it finds a niche populated by kids looking for a clever actioner that doesn't speak down to them, and by older kids and adults charmed by a mix of pop culture references both familiar enough to evoke Buffy and its contemporaries, and obscure enough to make them feel smart.

On paper it seems to hold little promise: "A young woman is recruited by a secret agency to fight against evil forces." More Men in Black than Buffy, it nevertheless offers little variation on the age-old trope. A world of aliens and monsters (and superintelligent, genetically-engineered primates) coexisting alongside the world of men. Sometimes peacefully, other times less so. And we all know what happens when someone from the outside discovers this secret world. As website TV Tropes puts it:

Beware, if you are discovered breaking the masquerade, you must either become part of it, or join those who fight or police it.

And that's pretty much what we have here. Wendy (Natalie Morales) is a geeky temp secretary who during one posting is attacked by what she describes as a "hentai tentacle monster". The beast is dealt with by an implacable stranger, the eponymous "Middleman" (Matt Keeslar), who fights evil using an array of whizzy gadgets supplied by an unknown power. Impressed by Wendy's poise in unusual circumstances ("95% of people would fill their shorts and be eaten"), he offers her a job as his apprentice/sidekick.



The Middleman doesn't wear its influences on its sleeve so much as have them tattooed on its face. Indeed, the pilot is a Frankenstein's Monster of Someone Else's Ideas. But what judicious employment of these concepts allows is room for the dialogue and characters to percolate without having to spend too long explaining the set-up. And while it doesn't subvert the trope entirely, it does undermine it with clever digs at both its own and the genre's preposterousness ("that belonged to my father, who disappeared in mysterious and as-yet-unexplained circumstances") and via the fourth wall-breaking captions. The dialogue is equally sly, assaulting the viewer with pop culture references and rat-a-tat sparring modelled after a classic screwball comedy. Morales' delivery is perfect: rapid-fire and deadpan, she's more Garofolo than Gellar, though hotter and geekier than both. Keeslar, channelling Dudley Do-Right and Constable Benton Fraser—shit, how amazing would Paul Gross be in this part?—isn’t quite so confident, but his might be the harder role: a former Navy Seal, the character is written as an endearing throwback to a more innocent time, ruthless, intelligent and maybe a little dim—all at the same time. And all the while spouting goshdang-it-to-heck dialogue (he never swears, except when he does).

But if the show seldom pauses long enough to allow appreciation some of the more delicious lines, nor does it allow reflection on its weaker moments; the throw-everything-at-the-viewer approach is the verbal equivalent of the visual gags in an Airplane!-style spoof; if you hear a bad line, it's OK because there'll be a quite splendid one along in just a minute. Only a few moments spoil the party: a series of gangster film quotations that not once stray from the obvious (The Godfather, Scarface—would something from White Heat have been amiss?), and a Planet of the Apes reference which I'm surprised didn't get left on The Simpsons' cutting-room floor where they found it. The show runs out of breath halfway through when Wendy's boyfriend reappears, a boring dick undeserving of both his screen time and Wendy's forgiveness. But it gets its second wind as it approaches a denouement marred only by the obvious deficiencies in the budget.

So ignore that, throw in a ridiculously human robot with a prickly demeanour, and a black-and-white aside that ends with an image of the Middleman holding an umbrella and Wendy wearing a scuba mask, and you're left with what has the potential to be one of the oddest and smartest shows you'll see this summer.

June 19, 2008 10:45 PM

Tragically, the prime minister has been held back by his lack of the quality that most fascinates him - courage Published in the Guardian...

June 18, 2008 08:51 PM

St Matthew’s warning that ‘unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away’ is the biblical quote least likely to stir the Labour soul.

That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England’s universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process.

Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every department in all the 200 universities. On their ruling rests the disposal of £5bn of public money.

The 2008 fight for loot is under way. Luckless workers at a Bristol warehouse are sending 200,000 scholarly books and papers to the 1,000 or so professors who adjudicate on 70 panels like the judges of beauty contests.

In the inaugural issue of the new magazine Standpoint, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University despairs of the absurdity of the enterprise. He explains that panels filled with professors of foreign languages have been more generous in rating the work of their peers than professors of English. Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature. What’s really happened, says Bate, is that while other professors of literature covered each other’s backs and looked after each other’s departments ‘the Eng lit lot couldn’t resist biting each other’s backs’ even if it meant their subject lost money.

Neither he nor the government says this, but a second failing of the system is that it creates conformism in supposedly independent minds. There are many honourable exceptions, but as a herd, academics are the most predictable of beasts. If I sit down with builders, dentists or accountants, I have no way of knowing what their opinions will